1420 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into Mandarin (Page 37)

(This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Festival) Continue Reading →

(This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Festival) Continue Reading →

The sleeper hit of 2022 (so far) has undoubtedly been Showtime’s Yellowjackets, a grisly, enthralling tale of a 1990’s all-girls high school soccer team forced to survive the Ontario wilderness after a plane crash, it hit audiences like a bolt of lightning. The simplest way to describe it is “LOST meets Alive meets Lord of the Flies with Riot Grrl energy” - but even that does a disservice to the stunning character development, the devolution into savagery—a particular kind of savagery that only young women are capable of—and the relentless pacing that creates as many questions as it answers. The brilliance of Yellowjackets is that you know these girls will descend into madness, and yet you come to love them knowing the ritualistic cannibalism that awaits them. Yes, there is cannibalism, but funnily it becomes the least interesting part of Yellowjackets as the first season progresses.  Continue Reading →

Say what you will about Apple TV’s Servant, but give it credit for its audacity. We’re three seasons in, and the series, executive produced by M. Night Shyamalan, remains as clear as mud as to both what’s happening, and to where it’s all going to lead. Not since Twin Peaks has a TV show been so dedicated to being completely incomprehensible. Watching it is like being led down one path, only to be violently jerked toward another. “No, it’s not about that, you silly goose,” it says. “It’s about this.” Until it becomes about something else. Season 3 throws less things at the wall to see what sticks, but things remain frustratingly opaque. Continue Reading →

Previous seasons of Netflix’s Ozark followed Martin and Wendy Byrde’s (Jason Bateman and Laura Linney) quest to survive death and prove their family’s worth to the cartel and their violent rivals. Now, in the fourth and final season, the Byrdes must figure out if they can survive without their dark, criminal lives. They sacrificed a lot to get to the top—but what would they sacrifice to stay there? Thanks to this ask and its answers, Ozark Season 4 Part 1 is slow-burn suspense at its finest, with the Byrde’s maneuvering to stay on top, no matter the personal costs.  Continue Reading →

One of the most gut-wrenching moments of the documentary Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America comes during interactions between ACLU deputy legal director Jeffrey Robinson and Josephine Bolling, daughter of Elmore Bolling, a man who was killed as part of a racial hate crime. During their interactions, she takes Robinson to the ditch where she found her father’s corpse years earlier. Rather than just hearing about these horrors, the camera bears witness to the land where a human being was discarded like he was nothing. Continue Reading →

With the meteoric popularity of Yellowjackets, a new installment of the Scream franchise, and the revival of shows like Saved by the Bell and The Babysitters Club, 90’s nostalgia is in full swing. It was only a matter of time before the true entertainment staple of the era made a comeback as well. I’m talking of course about the humble made-for-tv movie. The original TV movies of the 80’s and 90’s came in four basic flavors: teen morality play, hardboiled sleaze, young women being kidnapped/stalked/unalived, and Stephen King. The very best made-for-tv movies had overlap between the categories, with classics like Cyber Seduction, A Friend To Die For: Death of a Cheerleader, and No One Would Tell fueling the Monday morning water cooler roundups.  Continue Reading →

Hulu’s new series How I Met Your Father attempts to recreate the magic of the - wait for it! - legendary status of the original series How I Met Your Mother (HIMYM for short). This update proves a nostalgic ride for fans of the original series and an enjoyable journey for newcomers, even if it lacks some of the fresh qualities of its predecessor.   Continue Reading →

Say what you will about the Scream movies – while they’re almost as absurd as the movies they’re satirizing, they’re also each trying to say something. While the first movie was about slasher movies in general, Scream 2 explored the nature (and necessity) of sequels, while Scream 3 attempted (to less than successful results) a pre-#MeToo spotlight on sexual harassment, and, as an answer to the rise of Facebook and Twitter, Scream 4 focused on social media culture. Wes Craven set out to not just entertain and scare audiences, but to get them to think about what they were watching, exactly, and why. Continue Reading →

In 1996, a peaceful time of American prosperity between the Cold War and Twitter, music’s biggest things were imports. One was Canadian Queen Celine Dion, with her classic “It’s All Coming Back To Me Now” playing from car radios on constant rotation. The other was Irishman Michael Flatley who came to our shores with the step dancing phenomenon Riverdance.  Continue Reading →

It seems like every TV show is set in Manhattan. Be it Friends, Sex & the City, or Seinfeld, Manhattan is the de facto environs for our favorite television. Somebody Somewhere, HBO’s latest series from Hannah Bos (High Maintenance) and Paul Thureen, keeps the Manhattan setting, but swaps out the Hudson and East Rivers for the Kansas and Big Blue Rivers.  And just like the Little Apple seems like an inverse of the Big, this new show is a slice of lives drastically different from the hip and connected characters of Girls or And Just Like That....  Continue Reading →

The Pink Cloud opens with a disclaimer: “This film was written in 2017 and shot in 2019. Any resemblance to actual events is purely coincidental.” It doesn’t take more than a few minutes to realize just how necessary this disclaimer is because its parallels to the pandemic are frighteningly accurate. Only instead of a deadly disease keeping all the globe locked inside their homes, it’s a mysterious pink cloud that kills those that step outside almost instantly. Asking audiences to imagine a world where their lives are upended by a sudden quarantine that seems to stretch on indefinitely doesn’t actually require any imagination in 2022. Continue Reading →

The Hotel Transylvania series is a surprising juggernaut amongst contemporary family entertainment. Who would have guessed that a movie about a hotel for monsters would create a franchise where every sequel grows in both box office and critical success? With no signs of slowing down, it made sense for Sony to greenlight a fourth film. How could another sequel not be a hit at the box office? Well, I think we know how.   Continue Reading →

This review was originally written as part of our coverage of the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival; we're reposting it now that the film is available in theaters and VOD. Continue Reading →

Search Party, the TBS-turned-HBO Max comedy from co-creators Sarah-Violet Bliss, Charles Rogers, and Michael Showalter, has never been afraid of reinventing itself. While it started off as a satire of New York millennials trying (and failing) to find their own identities, the show kept evolving and playing with so many genres — from whodunit to legal drama to abduction thriller — throughout its run. The fifth and final season is no different, except this time, the story has higher stakes and doubles down even more on what makes the show so fearless and wildly entertaining in the first place. Continue Reading →

I'll say this for Simon Kinberg: he's got to be just about the nicest man in show business. After all, how do you get a second chance at the director's chair after the unmitigated disaster that was X-Men: Dark Phoenix? According to interviews, he only got that gig at the insistence of Jennifer Lawrence, who would only do the film with him in charge (he was reportedly very easy to work with when Bryan Singer went AWOL on X-Men Apocalypse, forcing Kinberg to pick up the baton). While working on Dark Phoenix, Jessica Chastain approached Kinberg with the idea of starring in and producing a female-led spy franchise a la Mission: Impossible; and so we have The 355, a film seemingly tailor-made to be the kind of mid-budget dross we get every January. Look out, Liam Neeson, you've got competition! Continue Reading →

In Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero, moral ambiguity runs rampant through the life of imprisoned Rahim Soltani (Amir Jadidi). Locked away for a debt he could not repay, Soltani has two days of leave to get his creditor, a family friend, to drop the charges. He owes the man a large sum, given as a pseudo-loan for a failing small business. A father to a young boy with a speech impediment, Rahim is understandably anxious to negotiate his freedom. When his girlfriend finds a lost bag filled with 17 gold coins, the moral conundrums begin, multiplying throughout the film with “nice” deeds and public interference.  Continue Reading →

The Tender Bar, streaming on Amazon January 7th, is based on J. R. Moehringer’s memoir of the same name. In practice though, it could be anyone’s story, and not because there’s a universality to the tale it tells. George Clooney’s film is so generic that the film's Moehringer might as well be a human-shaped blank space. Boasting the archly-drawn relatives of the film version of August: Osage County, the subtle needle drops of a Robert Zemeckis film, and the emotional insight of a Snapple lid fun fact, the picture leaves one thirsty for something of substance.   Continue Reading →

Much to the Republican Party’s dismay, the birth rate in the United States has been gradually on the decline, hitting an all-time low in 2020. Couples are not only waiting longer to have children, they’re having less of them, with an average of 1.6 per family. While climate change and cost of living expenses are the primary factors in the decision to have fewer children (or none at all), a small part of it can also be attributed to more people accepting a difficult truth: that raising children can be an incredibly hard and thankless task. Maggie Gyllenhaal makes an assured debut as a writer and director in her adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter, a complicated and strangely moving psychological drama/thriller about two women who bond over this truth. Continue Reading →

The modern era of musicals moves fits and spurts. Over this young century, the form has repeatedly fallen in and out of fashion. 2021 was an on year—one pulsing full of musicals, which ranged from towering works like Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story remake to the dreaded and thoroughly mocked Dear Evan Hansen. Many of them were quite experimental too, like Leos Carax and Sparks’ Annette and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s tick, tick…BOOM!. But even against that august competition, Joe Wright’s Cyrano carves out a place as one of the most imaginative musicals of this modern era. Although The National’s newly-composed songs don’t immediately gel with the iconic story being told, Cyrano makes its way towards a moving, complex finale, thanks to a stellar set of performances.  Continue Reading →